Examination of Witnesses (Questions 53-59)
MR CHRIS
LESLIE, MS
JANET GRAUBERG
AND MR
JAMES MORRIS
23 JUNE 2008
Q53 Chair: I think you have all been
here for the previous session, so you know what has been said.
Given that we have three witnesses and only about half an hour,
we are all going to have to be disciplined. Perhaps we could all
bear that in mind. Can I just start off with the questions about
the Lyons Inquiry. Having heard Sir Michael say what he thinks
the Lyons Inquiry achieved, and those things which the Government
took up, do you agree with him or disagree?
Mr Morris: I think that the Lyons
Inquiry certainly set out very clearly the policy area around
reforming local government, and I think that there are many recommendations
in the Lyons Inquiry which are good and sound and should be picked
up by government. I think though that the issue which I think
was being debated and skirted around in the question and answer
session is that the reality is that over probably the last ten
to 15 years the policy debate in this area has been chock-full
of contradictions. I was particularly interested in the point
that I think Anne was making about the fact that during the last
ten years we have had this movement towards very much top-down
approaches to both regional and local government at the same time
as there being rhetorical lip service paid to decentralisation
of power. So the example of planning powers being placed into
the hands of democratically unaccountable regional development
structures, for example, I think is an example of policy tensions
which still exist in the central/local relationship, and one could
go through a whole series of them around education, health, even
the provision of welfare, which are still very current.
Mr Leslie: I was quite overwhelmed,
I suppose, by the volume of Michael Lyons' report and the effort
and length to which he went to describe and cajole ministers to
make some changes but, fundamentally, I think where it feels a
little bit less than the sum of its parts is in the politics.
I think there were some very good, sound and quite pragmatic,
modest ideas about reform, but persuading governments of the day
to make the big leap to shift towards devolution, decentralisation,
localism, there was not really a compelling enough attractive
force there. The same really would apply, I suppose, for the other
political parties too. I think the reaction of the other political
parties to the Lyons Report were similarly very defensive. They
were quite happy to point out problems or flaws rather than recognise
the gains, the advantages, to be attained through moving to a
far more mature, sophisticated, decentralised way of doing decision-making
in this country.
Ms Grauberg: I would pick that
up, because I think the key question which underpins this, which
we have just touched on, is about the value that we as a nation
place on local democratic determination and decision making. This
is a "where there's a will, there's a way" point, in
that we presently have a model where it appears that this is not
much valued, and the questions that we had about performance management
are examples of that, and schools' budgets, housing budgets and
whatever. It is easy to understand why, because on the issue of
what Sir Michael called "confused accountability", actually
central government is often blamed for failures in local government
and is unwilling to have that debate, but it seems to me if we
do not work through those fundamental decisions and views, and
in particular take into account not just what the present Government
views are but the views of political parties and the people that
they seek to represent, any of the particular changes that we
want to make, any of the particular changes that Sir Michael has
recommended, and any particular words you want to put into a concordat
are going to be skating over the surface.
Q54 Chair: One of the things that
Sir Michael said was that he was trying to inform public discourse.
Apart from think-tanks such as yourselves, which are clearly part
of the public but not quite what he was meaning, do you think
it has informed a public discourse—not politicians, not
us lot, not you?
Mr Morris: I think, in short order,
probably not, not in the wider world. I still think that people
are on the whole unclear about the role of local government, that
they are not sure who is responsible for what. If you ask somebody
about policing, for example, and they say "Who is responsible
for fighting crime in your area? How does that relate to the local
authority?" they probably do not know. I think there is still
a big gap that exists between the local government level and perceptions
of voters and perceptions of local communities. That is one of
the points which I think Sir Michael was making about trust, that
there still is a lack of trust between local communities and the
decisions taken on their behalf by central and often local government.
It seems to me that, until that gap is closed significantly, we
are still going to have some problems around the speed of reform.
Mr Leslie: I do not think that
the Lyons Report really gelled or set the public alight in any
particular way, apart from perhaps a few torrid headlines about
council tax and revaluation, as Sir Michael was pointing out.
As with a lot of our work, we can talk about local government
reform but sometimes the things that are reported are about the
bins or about council tax, maybe the occasional local election
results, but even those can simply be a reflection of the national
political perspective. I had great hopes for Michael Lyons' report,
and I think he did really as well as he could on the technical
side. I think there was a need to really prove not just the political
case, as I was saying before, but also to get a head of steam
going amongst the public to demand a change from this archaic
system for decision-making, the constitution that we currently
operate under, which sees so much power centralised in Whitehall,
when so many of the challenges facing the country in the 21st
century require local, tailored, personalised solutions on the
front line, and we are still too far from that.
Q55 Chair: How would we do that then?
Ms Grauberg: I think we can agree
that Sir Michael Lyons' report did not galvanise that in the way
that it might have done but I do not think that is a cause for
despair. He argued very much that this was a challenge for local
government itself to take up the baton and to have that debate.
We do see in the conversations that people have, whether it is
policing or polyclinics or post offices, a willingness to have
a conversation on a very local basis about where the responsibility
lies, the balance between national provision and local flexibility,
however that is described. Just because it has not happened in
response to a weighty tome does not mean that it could not happen
in future in a different way.
Q56 Dr Pugh: I just want to pick
up on something that has just been said. You are an optimistic
bunch with lots of good ideas for the future but I wonder whether
you accept the pessimistic view I present. There is a lack of
clarity amongst the general public about what local and national
governments' respective roles are, and it is not obvious who ought
to be blamed when things go wrong, so it is quite understandable
that central government want to manage things themselves. If they
are going to pick up the blame, they will be punished at the local
elections for things that local councils may or may not have done.
It would be really nice to have clarity about the respective roles
of central and local government. I just wonder whether you think
it is achievable and, if so, how it can be achieved, given that
there is a natural entanglement of national and local government.
Is there ever going to be a day when the public actually know
what their council does and can legitimately be accountable for
and what central government does on the other hand and distinct
from local government?
Mr Morris: You are in a sense
engaging in futurology. With the trends of technology and the
trends of the use of data and information in new ways, one of
the keys to re-engagement of local government with local communities
is through the sharing and presentation of data, by which I mean
not just a local authority telling me where my local swimming
pool is but a local authority telling me very clearly about the
performance of my local police force and where the crime hotspots
are, a local authority telling me about the performance of my
hospitals in comparison with others. Given the propensity of communities
and voters these days to use technology and mine data it seems
to me that that has to be one of the ways in which engagement
can be promoted so that people do begin to really understand in
a clear way what it is that their local authority is doing for
them. That would be one idea.
Q57 Chair: There are already league
tables on schools, on crime rates, on hospitals, on MRSA rates.
I am not quite clear how that enables the public to get behind
the reason why their hospital may be worse or better than somebody
else's?
Mr Morris: I am talking about
information that goes beyond league tables. I think you could
argue that league tables are a manifestation of the current problem
because they are a central government set of parameters which
are put around local information. What I am talking about is inverting
that; I am talking about information which is bottom-up information.
Q58 Chair: Can you give an example.
What do you mean by bottom-up?
Mr Morris: If we look at the way
in which young people are increasingly interacting with community
websites, for example, like MySpace and so on. They are beginning
to interact with information in a completely different way. They
share information about what is going on. I am talking about that,
the way in which information about local authorities is at the
moment aggregated in silos, and it needs to be much more accessible
in a network way.
Mr Leslie: I think there is a
lot to be said on the data question but just coming back to your
original question: ultimately, can the public understand where
power lies? Yes, I think they can. Is it clear about whether it
lies with local decision-makers or national decision makers? I
suspect not so much right now. I believe though in the future
it is inevitable that power will have to be devolved and decentralised
if public services are to be delivered successfully, appropriately
and efficiently, because the nature and divergence of the challenge
is such that trying to do all these transactional activities through
from a Whitehall quango-ised basis is not sustainable. So over
time I really do think that any government of whatever political
complexion is going to have to devolve power downwards. I personally
think the public would prefer to have a greater proximity with
those who are making decisions over their lives. That sort of
subsidiary subsidiarity principle has been around for quite some
time. The question is whether politicians at the centre, again,
of all political complexions, are going to have the foresight
to let go in time in order to see those services flourish or whether
they are going to be stifling that potential by hanging on to
things unduly long.
Q59 Dr Pugh: So they have got to
let certain local authorities sink or swim at times, even if the
consequences are politically unpalatable. Can I persist with the
question I asked Sir Michael a few minutes ago: it seems to me
that one part of the devolution mentioned by the Government is
the kind of devolution that goes beyond the council to various
other groups as well as a way of basing community decision-making
more thoroughly in the community. Would you like to comment on
my view that this often makes the decision-making process genuinely
more opaque at times? I will give a very simple example. I was
talking to a local reporter today about a change of policy in
my local authority area with regard to statementing. We had to
start talking about the schools forum, and I had to explain—and
my knowledge was by no means adequate—what the schools forum
was and how that stood in the decision tree, as it were. We were
not completely clear even after my explanation, I have to say.
Can you comment on the handing on of local authority powers?
Ms Grauberg: I think it is a good
question, and there are a number of different ways of approaching
it. Professor George Jones in a report which the Public Management
and Policy Association published, argued through it, and his argument
was that there are models of devolving beyond the local authority
that serve to reinforce rather than undermine the decision-making
abilities and the democratic nature of local government. An option,
whether it is about participatory budgeting or schools in conversation
with the local education authority, advising ward councillors
or the executive or scrutiny or whatever, there are models that
serve both to allow greater devolved decision-making and to bolster
the elected democratic nature of local government. There are also
models that seek to bypass that and those who sometimes argue
against that greater level of engagement at whatever level it
is, often assume that those are the only models that exist.
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